Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday January 07, 2014 @05:57PM
from the i'll-order-a-dozen dept.

harrymcc writes "In 2012, TIME wrote about Daniel Omar, a 14-year-old in South Sudan who lost both arms to a bomb dropped by his own government. Mick Ebeling of Not Impossible Labs read the story, was moved — and went to Sudan, where he set up a 3D printing lab which can produce an artificial arm for $100. Omar and others have received them, and Ebeling hopes that other organizations around the world will adopt his open-source design to help amputees, many of whom will never receive more conventional prosthetics."

I could easily go to the hardware store and grab a 1 inch aluminum pipe to use as a shin for a client for a couple of dollars, but it's illegal to do so even though it's the exact same part I buy for around $100 from a supplier.

In the US, maybe. But this article is about Sudan. Luckily we don't have tens of thousands of people a year losing limbs due to a horrible civil war, and luckily they don't have any lawyers.

Sure, living in a war-torn country and working for minimal pay is not probably not something you (or I) want to do, but luckily there are in fact people who do. And the victims/patients have no money whatsoever, so it won't matter to them whether it's $100 or $100,000. But it will matter to those people/companies/governments donating money and time. That's the whole POINT of TFA! They want to give 1000 refugees the ability to feed themselves, not one yuppie the ability to climb their indoor rock wall again. An they actually provided the equipment and training and the locals are now printing and assembling the limbs themselves.